Haunting Embrace (29 page)

“Who in bloody hell is this?” he demanded, pushing to his feet.

Colleen spun around and saw Meaghan hovering in the shadows. “Meaghan,” she said. Then, with a nervous glance at Brion, she repeated it. “Meaghan Ballagh. My cousin from Wexford.”

“I didn’t know you had relatives in Wexford,” Brion said, drawing a frowning glance from Francis.

“And why would you know?” Colleen retorted with raised brows, sounding every bit like the spirited woman she would one day become. “But sure and I do have relatives there, and here is one of them.”

Meaghan gave a hesitant smile and took another step into the room. “I’m sorry to have been eavesdropping, Colleen, but I couldn’t help but hear. Is it true then? Is Mickey dead?”

“Yes,” Francis said, watching her with rounded eyes.

The shock on his face made her wish she’d taken the time to brush her hair or check a mirror before she’d stepped out. What must she look like? A wild woman who’d been shagging her brains out on the floor all night? She hadn’t taken the time to put on her bra or find her panties in the mess of blankets. Now she did the walk of shame into the front room.

Blushing, she perched on the chair next to Colleen’s, careful to keep her hem down and knees tight together. Niall squealed with delight at seeing her, and she let him wrap his chubby fingers around her thumb.

“Have you seen the man who works for your cousin’s husband?” Brion asked, sitting again, although he still looked very suspicious as he watched her.

This close she could see that his eyes were bright and no flat glitter gleamed from their depths. She bit back her sigh of relief. At least for now, Cathán and the Book had not corrupted him. But that didn’t mean he had nothing to do with the murder.

“Have you seen this Áedán Brady?” Brion demanded when she still hadn’t answered.

Meaghan wet her lips. “What do you want with Áedán?” she stalled, trying to think of the best way to avoid this train wreck.

“He’s wanted for murder, and as the magistrate for Ballyfionúir, Francis intends to hold him until the authorities arrive.”

Francis looked both surprised and resigned by this announcement.

“Áedán didn’t murder anyone,” she said. “Least of all Mickey. You don’t believe them, do you, Colleen?”

“No,” Colleen agreed. “I do not believe it.”

“You seem quite certain,” Brion said with a piercing look at Meaghan. “You also seem to know this man exceptionally well. Why is that?”

“Well, as it turns out, I do know him. We were friends before we came here.”

“Were you now? And when did you arrive?”

“Just yesterday. But I was here when Mickey . . . when he tried to harm my cousin. Áedán saved her.”

“Yes, we’ve established that,” Brion said. “What is still unclear is where he went after that.”

Meaghan glanced over her shoulder. From this angle, she could see Áedán watching her, and the stricken expression on his face silenced her for a moment. He looked like a man about to meet his death sentence. She realized in that instant that he expected her to condemn him. To shove him under the train as it raced ever closer. To betray him.

“He did come here,” she said, pulling her gaze back to the men seated in front of her and Colleen, perched so stiffly at her side. “To see me.”

All three of them gave an incredulous, “What?” at the same time. Under different circumstances, it might have been funny. But these weren’t different circumstances. They were very dire ones.

“And we heard Mickey come home as well,” she went on. “He ate something. His dishes are still in the kitchen where he left them.”

“He came home?” Colleen repeated weakly.

“But then he left again after he’d eaten. We heard someone else, but we don’t know who.”

“What time was it?” Brion demanded, his face white with anger.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see the clock, but I would guess after midnight.”

“And where were you and Mr. Brady at the time? Did you speak to Mickey?”

“Well, no.” Meaghan could feel her face growing hotter by the second.

She felt like a virgin confessing to her first tryst. She was a grown woman, entitled to a bit of a romp when she wanted. But this was 1950-something, and women of this era did not romp, even with their husbands. Sex was a sin unless performed for the purpose of procreation. Divorce wouldn’t even be legal for decades to come.

Meaghan realized she’d gone from uncertain footing to perilous ground. To this generation’s way of thinking, if there was passion between a man and a woman, it had better wait until they were married, and it certainly should not rage out of control in a storage room off the kitchen of the woman’s grandmother’s house. It seemed sordid now, regardless of how it had felt when it happened. And it had felt . . .

She gave herself a mental shake.

“Where. Were. You?”
Brion repeated. His face tightened with fury and his blue eyes blazed.

“In the storage room?” she admitted, and even she heard the question mark at the end. Her face had grown so hot that sweat began to prickle at her scalp. She felt like the word
fornicator
had been etched on her forehead. Francis looked too stunned for reaction.

The silence that followed her words seemed insurmountable. Her entire body was on fire now, and not the way it had been last night. Not with passion. Not with desire.

“And when did you and Mr. Brady leave this
storage room
?” Brion demanded.

“Just a little while ago. There’s no way Áedán could have killed Mickey. He was with me all night.”

“You spent the night with Mr. Brady?” Colleen said. Her widened gaze skittered to Meaghan, then to the kitchen doorway. “Together? In me kitchen?” Her voice squeaked at the end.

Brion lunged from his chair and charged to the kitchen, Francis following close on his heels. Meaghan hurried after them, braced for Brion to shoot first and ask questions later. But when she rounded the corner, she didn’t see Áedán anywhere.

Meaghan barely had time to register this before Brion jerked the storage door open. She let out a shaky breath. Áedán wasn’t hiding there, either. While Brion, Francis, and Colleen stared into the tiny room, Meaghan tried to peer through the panes in the window for a sign of Áedán. He’d been quick—she didn’t see a trace of him.

Reluctantly, she watched the others, who stood like statues arranged in an arc around the storage room’s doorway. The cot had been stripped and the blankets were on the floor where she and Áedán had made their little love nest. The scent of sex wafted out on the crisp morning air. The bra she’d been looking for when she’d dressed poked out of the tangled mess. Brion stepped over the blankets and lifted the lacy scrap with one finger. The absolute silence shouted just how very scandalized every one of them was.

Thinking she might expire from embarrassment, Meaghan yanked the bra from Brion’s hand and crammed it in her pocket.

“You’d have me believe he was with you in this small room
all night
,” Brion sneered. “You lie.”

“I don’t lie,” Meaghan answered, lifting her chin in a gesture Colleen often made. “I don’t need to lie. Yes, he was here. With me. All night. And we didn’t need a lot of room, if you get my meaning, Mr. MacGrath.”

Behind her, Colleen made a strangled sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Francis gulped loudly. Brion stood speechless, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

Colleen interrupted the painful silence that had fallen. She shifted the baby to her other hip and indicated her kitchen with a disgusted look. “This is Mickey’s mess. The man was a pig.”

As one they all turned from the long, narrow closetlike room and surveyed the kitchen. The stew pot sat on the counter, stew slopped over every inch of space, spilled on the floor, spattered on the table. It looked as if, in his drunkenness, he’d intentionally flung it everywhere he could. Meaghan was pretty sure he’d been too intoxicated for any deliberate action, though.

The bowl on the table held a dried crust of the stew’s gravy and a fat fly buzzed lazily over the droppings. Bread crumbs covered the table and floor around it, and Meaghan saw that Mickey had foregone the knife to rip hunks from the loaf with disregard to anyone who might want a piece of bread when he was finished. The bottle Mickey had been drinking from last night sat opened beside an empty glass with a brown ring at the bottom. It had been three-quarters filled when they’d sat for dinner. Now it was nearly empty.

“Well, then,” Francis said, blinking at the mess. “It appears Miss Ballagh has told us the truth about Mickey coming and”—he gave the storage room an embarrassed glance—“and about the other as well. I’d say Mr. Brady has a solid alibi. This changes a thing or two.”

Brion made a growling sound but nodded. “Aye, that it does.”

Chapter Nineteen

T
HE Irish were a superstitious lot. They feared death in ways that other cultures never considered, and at the same time, they loved it. Few would choose to miss an Irish wake—not even the deceased. The last funeral Meaghan attended had been Colleen’s, and people had come from near and far to say good-bye.

Meaghan doubted Mickey Ballagh had inspired love from anyone and held equal skepticism that he’d even been particularly liked. But death was death and rituals had to be followed. Once the end came, it mattered little whether the dearly departed had been adored or hated, admired or despised.

Enid arrived first with a casserole and a warm, caring smile for Colleen. But others came soon after, interrupting Brion and Francis in order to express their sympathies, offer pearls of wisdom, or just appease their blatant curiosity. Ballyfionúir was a peaceful town, and the excitement of a good old-fashioned murder was not to be missed.

“’Tis sorry I am to hear of your loss, Mrs. Ballagh,” they said, one after another. “A dastardly thing, stabbings. Sure and wouldn’t there be a lot of blood. I heard his head was chopped clean off. Is it true?”

And in their faces, Meaghan saw the grisly hope that the rumors were true.

Most of them knew—or thought they knew—what kind of man Mickey was and what kind of marriage Colleen had with him. They suspected that Colleen secretly rejoiced his gruesome demise but no one said it—not to her anyway. But they didn’t hesitate to discuss it in pseudowhispers behind her back.

Meaghan’s sense of the surreal grew to mammoth proportions as the morning ticked on. People whose faces she’d known her entire life appeared now without wrinkles or recognition when they turned her way. She’d played with many of their grandchildren, dated some of their grandsons, and babysat their great-grandkids—but none of those people had yet to be born. In reality,
Meaghan
hadn’t either. Occasionally someone would give her a peculiar look, as if something in her genetic build had sparked a memory, but then they’d turn away, certain they’d made a mistake.

She kept to the edges of the gathering, bobbing her father on her hip and smiling when addressed. But her thoughts stayed mainly with Áedán. The comb had meant something to him. It had linked facts and suspicions that Meaghan couldn’t begin to guess at. When she’d mentioned the woman in white, his face had paled and the look in his eyes . . . She shivered. It had been such a bewildering mixture of joy, dread, and rage that it left her uneasy even now.

The woman had to be the White Fennore, the one Kyle claimed Áedán had betrayed, thus motivating her to curse him until the end of time. But according to Áedán, it was the White Fennore who had done both the betraying and the cursing. Elan, he’d called her, and he’d spoken the name with a soft lilt he couldn’t disguise.

She looked down at her hands, thinking of the blood that had coated them. Could it have been real? As real as the comb she’d slipped in her pocket when no one was looking? She shifted the baby to her other side and reached down to touch the comb, feeling the grooves, the teeth. Assuming the dream had been more than
just a dream
, why had the White Fennore come to her? Why had she given Meaghan this comb? And what did it mean to Áedán?

She forced herself to focus on Colleen and what her poor grandmother was going through. Colleen stood straight and proud in her kitchen, greeting the newcomers, pretending to be unaware of the gossip raging in every corner or of the big man looming over her. But Meaghan could see the tiny cracks in her mask. Brion MacGrath was not someone to be ignored, and Colleen was perhaps more susceptible to him than anyone else.

“Mrs. Ballagh!” A plump woman with bulging eyes and bad teeth charged forward with a plate of pastries that looked like it might have been dropped on the way, and a meaty hug that could have broken Colleen in two. “I’m so sorry, I am. I come as soon as I heard.”

Colleen looked surprised but quickly hid it behind a polite smile. Already there were too many people taking up the limited floor space in the kitchen, but the woman squeezed herself into the mix, never taking her gaze off Brion MacGrath.

She looked at him with such longing, Meaghan was half convinced she wished her own husband had been stabbed to death and she the widow who’d earned a visit from the handsome Mr. MacGrath. It seemed funny in a macabre sort of way. When at last the woman looked back at Colleen, she said in a sugary voice, “Mr. Ballagh was a sweet, kind man. We’ll be feeling the loss of him for a long time to come.”

The disbelief that comment generated barely had time to register before another female appeared at the back door. This one was as tall and thin as the other was short and round. She had wavy black hair, cut tight around her face and piled high on top. A bow that looked a bit girlish for her long, angular features held back the curls at her temple, and bright lipstick drew the eye to a wide mouth and full lips. Dark brows made perfect wings over brown eyes that had been outlined with a pencil, making them look bigger and more alluring. Bedroom eyes. She was beautiful in an interesting and intriguing way. The kind of woman who in certain lights and at certain angles would be breathtaking while at the same time, under others might appear harsh and rawboned.